


walk with a walk that is measured and slow

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Established Relationship, M/M, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-30 01:49:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10866504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Nicky wakes up with the cuffs still on.





	walk with a walk that is measured and slow

**Author's Note:**

> content notes at the end, click through. 
> 
> apologies to maurice sendak from whom i borrowed this title wholesale for elegiac semi-porn.

Nicky wakes up with the cuffs still on.

The link between them clinks, close to his face, soft leather warm against his skin. It would be the work of a minute to take them off, twist his fingers against the buckles and tug at the straps until they came undone, but he doesn’t.

Just because they’re not locked doesn’t mean they’re his to remove.

-

“Your place or mine?” Alex asks, when Nicky is sitting in his stall with his head tipped back, skull resting on the fading warmth of wet pads.

“Yours,” Nicky says to the roof of it, close and veneer-brown, head feeling almost too heavy to move.

Alex grunts and extends him a hand.

-

“How are your knees?” Alex asks, pushing Nicky back against the inside of his front door with a loose hand against his throat.

“Sore,” Nicky tells him, quiet and honest, even if it wrenches at him to admit it. That’s the rule, the only one that matters. No marks, no injury, no lies.

“We do something else, then.” Alex takes him by the wrist and spins him, pressing him hard against the wood so Nicky’s face turns sideways, so all he can see is half of Alex’s face, and all he can feel is his grip and the burning weight of him keeping him still. “Stay,” Alex orders, so he does.

-

Nicky is not— it would be too easy, for it to be like that. It would be too simple to just melt into Alex’s touch, to defer and to fight only for the attention of it, for his boundaries and his rights, to tick all the boxes. Colour in every preference all in a neat row, as though a form can ever be a substitute for knowing a person.

Nicky isn’t like that. When Nicklas fights he fights because he means it, because it’s intolerable not to, because Alex will never turn him aside and try to defuse him against his will.

Nicky always has to ask. Maybe if he were better at this it would be easier to be taken in hand, to be gentled. Maybe it would feel right not to ask, and for Alex to know somehow, what Nicky needs and when he needs it.

Nicky can’t imagine acquiescing to that; to release that means surrender, for him, and that’s not what— maybe it’s not the right way to look at it, maybe that intimate knowledge is what the cravings people create in stories is all about, but—

He isn’t. He doesn’t. He can’t.

-

“Your place or mine,” Alex asks, when what he means is, you or me tonight, which of us is the one who needs what most?

Often, Nicky sees tension in the line of Alex’s neck, or clenched tight in the hook of his jaw, and thinks he knows what the answer will be.

“Yours,” Alex answers, sometimes, and Nicky will take him home and put him on his knees, slip the blindfold over his eyes and leave his hand cupped around the back of Alex’s skull, waiting until he unclenches his fists.

Or: “Mine,” Alex says, accent thick with tension, with a loss, with a house empty of the people he keeps in it and the noise he fills it with, and he’ll take Nicky home and twist his arms up behind his back, just on the right side of rough.

-

Nicky wakes up with the cuffs still on, and knows it’s not over yet, that if Alex were satisfied they would be gone and Alex would be in the kitchen or the bathroom and Nicky could go and find him, stay at his usual arm’s length before Alex invites him back in.

There’s still something lingering, an itch, an urge, a restless press of stress and loss.

Alex almost took them off last night, but Nicky had hesitated, just for a second, to give him his wrists.

“No?” Alex asked, soaked in sweat, hands warm around Nicky’s forearms, cupping around the leather.

“As you like,” Nicky had said, distantly, resenting being made to talk, meaning _not yet, don’t give me back yet._

“Of course.” Alex had tugged on the ring between them, hard and sharp, and Nicky had not quite been dazed enough to groan. “Not yet, then.”

This morning, Alex is draped against his back, and Nicky is too hot. This morning, he can’t push him off, can’t do anything but tug at the press of them, absently, pulling at the resistance.

Alex wakes up slowly, heavy arm moving until he’s flush to Nicky’s, elbow bending where his bends, huge hand stilling him, laced in between his fingers. “Stop it,” Alex says. “Jingling. It’s wake me up.”

“You left them on,” Nicky mutters, petulant and deliberate with it.

Alex can move as quickly as a cat when he feels like it, but he’s also as lazy as one, and as prone to demands. This time, instead of dragging Nicky off the bed, instead of reacting with one of those bursts of movement that Nicky can never anticipate and has never managed to brace for, he just brings Nicky’s forfeited hands close to his chest, angle uncomfortable, and turns him, forcing him onto his back. Alex drapes a wide thigh over Nicky’s hips when he jerks at the manhandling, pinning him to the mattress.

Alex has his eyes closed, moving by feel. “Quiet, Nicky,” Alex orders, voice a rumble in his chest. Nicky feels the heat spreading low and insistent, in his gut, in his spine, in the press of skin against skin as Alex’s body holds him down. The restlessness doesn’t fade. Nicky wishes it was that simple, that he could convince himself to relax, to let it happen, to accept that part of the game is letting Alex take his time, but they’re halfway through the season and—

Nicky is everyone’s centre, but his own.

“Thinking too loud,” Alex says, shifting minutely, thigh brushing up against the underside of Nicky’s half-erect morning state, making him gasp. Alex shakes his wrists, grip still firm on Nicky’s bound hands. “Where are we?”

“Yours,” Nicky whispers, wanting to fight, wanting to be made not to.

“Mine,” Alex confirms, before he opens his eyes, face so close to Nicky’s he can see the flecks in them, the grey in the blue.

He moves quickly, for such a big man. He always moves like he means it.

He drags Nicky’s hands over his head, holds them there, looking at him, and Nicky is helpless, can only look back, can only let Alex’s face be his whole field of vision, can only draw a breath through his teeth and hold it. Can only wait.

He’s almost close enough to kiss, almost close enough to anticipate. “Tell me what you want,” Alex says, and it’s— it’s too far from what Nicky is after that he snarls, trying to jerk out of Alex’s grip.

“There we go,” Alex mutters through his clenched jaw as he yanks, draws Nicky’s hands up and up and fixes them there, bolt straining as Nicky, hard and frustrated and so angry all of a sudden, so ready to boil over that Nicky aches with it.

Nicky doesn’t like to fight. Nicky fights like it’s a test, an acid immersion to temper him. Nicky fights like he means it.

Alex slips a thumb in Nicky’s mouth, pad of it pressing hard on his tongue. “You done?”

All over is an ache, the taste of Alex’s skin and the texture of him, hair and muscle and the ridges of his thumbprint. Nicky thinks about biting him. Nicky thinks about snapping his fingers and being released without a single question.

Nicky takes Alex’s knuckle between his incisors, flicks his tongue against the tip, and lets his head fall back.

The rest of Alex’s fingers hook up under his jaw, resting in the soft space under his chin, nails too blunt to scratch.

Alex doesn’t praise him. Nicky doesn’t want him to.

-

“Yours,” Nicky says, once, knocked out in the second round again, like hearing the same song so many times it just becomes noise, or just making the same fucking mistakes every time.

Alex is as angry as Nicky is, bursting out of his skin with it, palm laid over the back of Nicky’s neck trembling.

Nicky expects to hurt. He’s asked for it, after all, but all Alex gives him is a different kind of torture, the kind Alex throws his whole self into in the absence of success; he works Nicky open with his fingers, with his tongue, until it takes everything Nicky has left in reserve to keep his hands on the edge of Alex’s desk, palms slick with sweat leaving fingerprints on the green leather padding.

There’s nothing tying him down, but it would be easier if there was.

Nicky almost collapses, hips first into the wood, spending himself with the very last of his reserves, thighs and abdomen and back burning from the stillness, but Alex loops an arm around his chest and holds him up.

And then, only then, does the haze come, the bottom of the well, the fluid suspension of surrender.

-

“Your place or mine?” Nicky asks.

Alex looks at him, vibrating, wound up, too close to the win to be happy yet, elation turning to adrenaline crash the way Nicky is so, so familiar with.

“Yours.”

It’s a surprise, but it isn’t. Alex likes to win, and he likes to win well. He likes hard and fast, decisive. He likes the back of a hand and the drag of fingers in his hair, and when Nicky pushes inside him, just on the edge of too soon, Alex lets out the deep breath he’s been holding all at once.

There’s satisfaction in this that has no sibling in any other part of his life: there’s power in the trust, and there’s a thin edge, sharp as a razor in Nicky, that enjoys hurting him. Nicky enjoys how much Alex enjoys it, but he enjoys it for himself too, cuts himself on it just as deeply and just as fine.

It takes Alex so much less time to get there, to reach the point where everything is sensation and breath. Nicky envies him, sometimes.

It’s easy to touch him. He's easy with letting himself be touched.

-

“So, like, which of you is—“

“It’s not like that,” Nicky says, grabbing Wilson’s wrist, moving his arm away.

Wilson shrugs, easy and good-natured and happy not to question himself. “Whatever you’re into, I guess,” he says. “Seems complicated, though.”

“Fuck off,” Nicky tells him, smiling, punching him gently, like he doesn’t mean it.

-

Nicky goes to sleep with the cuffs still on, unsatisfied, liminal, restless, the press of Alex’s fingers around the edges of them still hot over the bones of his wrists.

-

Nicky wakes up with the cuffs still on, hands stretched out in front of him like a request, a supplicant's cupped petition.

Alex breaths against his back, skin to skin, taking his time, waiting for Nicky to fight himself down.

-

**Author's Note:**

> NO EXPLICIT NEGOTIATION TAKES PLACE HERE, it's implied they have never had the conversation but can also be read as just an established relationship, ymmv


End file.
